Yeah, it’s been a while…
After much wrestling with glue and fabric and wadding, I finally finished the quilting lines. I had to piece up quite a bit of the calico backing, to my embarrassment, and I never did get around to removing the pencil lines from the canvas. Or washing the glue out.
Ultimately, I only used about half of the quilting lines, though miscounting resulted in an odd number of lines so there’s a narrow section in the middle. I doubt it’ll be noticeable.
Attaching the fancy fabric, attaching the loops and hemming shouldn’t be a huge problem, and I plan to leave myself room to add hem weights if needed (as it stands, it seems like it’ll be heavy enough as it is). Except for the on-off hot weather, ongoing problems trying to use the cramped and awkward office to sew in, ongoing general life problems and burnout, and returning to study now eating into my time and motivation… all resulting in having done very little on it since the last post. (Which might have been obvious from the radio silence.)
And then there’s hanging it. The doorframe has three long screws jutting out of it at the top – not really helpful, but I put together three loops in green canvas anyway, ready to attach them at the right intervals… except the screws aren’t evenly spaced, predictably. (If you think this is bad – the bathroom light fitting is rotated about 20 degrees and so crooked relative to all four walls, somehow. No reason other than that it being part of the extremely questionable DIY ‘renovation’, probably.)
You might say ‘why not replace these screws with a rod and screw-in curtain hooks with screws long enough to attach into the framing behind the door frame to ensure security?’ To which I say, ‘landlords’. Just getting regular, routine maintenance that has to be performed on any house or the most basic repairs done is already like pulling teeth – things like gutters being cleaned, or door locks that have worn to where they no longer secure a door replaced – and getting permission for picture hooks or a curtain rod is borderline impossible.
I don’t think I’ll be doing this again either. More because I like to think that the next place I live in won’t have missing doors that the owner refuses to replace. But also because I think that’s been a big source of the burnout – the reasons I’m stuck doing this, the reasons I have such a poor space to work in (otherwise the alternative is not sewing at all for half of the year or more, thanks to the problems of trying to sew in an uninsulated metal shed), the reasons I have to live in this house.
So, I don’t know when I’ll be doing more sewing – I’d hoped to move everything back into the shed this week, but the shed is currently once again about 10-20C hotter than outside until well into the night, and that doesn’t seem to be changing again. By the time it’s likely to, my classes will have ramped up to 3-4 days a week. It’s very hard to find motivation to keep at sewing in the face of that when it comes on top of the rest of my current situation.
I’ve tried to pivot to other creative endeavours – some attempts at bullet journalling, the (not particularly successful) jewelry, woodworking (which has also hit repeated snags in the form of ‘turns out you can’t get timber delivered and it doesn’t fit in the car’) and now knitting, but I’ve found these equally difficult to blog about. It already took a lot to push myself to blog about sewing given that it’s hard to do things with one’s hands *and* take photos of it (much less do that and also write about it and promote it in any effective manner) and I don’t think I’m going to get much better at it with anything else. But that’s why I don’t have an update schedule and don’t expect anything from this blog.
Dartigen.SPACE 